The Imminent Future of Car-to-Car Connectivity

Technology takes it ten steps further.

By
Sam Abuelsamid

Sep 21, 2016

Illustration by Christopher Delorenzo

There was a time not so many years ago when you could get in your car and drive to completely escape from the grind of daily life. That's rapidly becoming harder and harder to do, as everything in our lives now seems to be a connected node on the internet of everything. In fact, connectivity is quickly becoming a key enabler of other vehicle technologies including automation and electrification.

Over the course of the 20th century, the automobile helped to transform society around the world, giving people a degree of personal mobility that was unprecedented in human history. That allowed us to live farther from where we work and play while still enabling us to get to where we want to be.

But as the world's population continues to grow and more people move into cities, those urban areas are spreading both out and up. Today there are 28 megacities with populations of more than 10 million people. By mid-century, that number will likely top 40 and many of those cities will have populations in the tens of millions. Living in urban skyscrapers can have benefits with access to all of the activities a city can offer. Unfortunately, the pleasure of owning and driving a car quickly becomes impractical and unaffordable.

At some point in the next few decades, there is a good chance few if any city-dwellers will own a car, but almost everyone will use one whenever they need it to augment what is possible with mass transit. The only way we'll be able to manage congestion and move people efficiently in these cities will be through on-demand, connected, autonomous, electric vehicles.

Mercedes-Benz

Connecting to the World Outside the Vehicle

Today we can use remote services such as Mercedes me, which is powered by mbrace to quickly get information and directions on the go, automatically summon emergency assistance, remotely diagnose problems and remotely start/lock/unlock your Mercedes-Benz from your smartphones. On our plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles we can also use the always-on connection to check the charging status of the battery, turn on the air conditioning or heat, and even get alerts when your vehicle is finished charging.

Using smartphone projection systems like Apple Carplay and Android Auto we can bring our favorite media, messaging and navigation apps right into the car so we can personalize the experience.

"Personalizing the in-car experience is one of the key benefits of the connected car experience," said Tim Evavold, director of connected car and dealer ecosystems at Covisint. "Being able to identify and authenticate users will be a crucial component of making sure we can do this safely as we add even more connected services."

The first embedded telematics systems to include a cellular radio and connect to other systems in the car debuted 20 years ago. Today these systems offer more services to the driver than we could have imagined then and that will continue to expand in the future. Unlike those slow and limited analog cellular connections of the 1990s, today's cars are sporting built-in 4G LTE wireless broadband along with the connections from our paired phones, and 5G systems will be here by the early 2020s. In 2016, we're seeing the first cars that can talk back to the cloud and soon to each other over Car-to-X communications systems and those should be ubiquitous by the mid-2020s.

Imagine your car sees dangerous situations or hazards even before you or conventional sensors notice them

"Imagine your car sees dangerous situations or hazards even before you or conventional sensors notice them," said Gorden Wagener, head of design at Daimler AG. "Our new E-Class is the first production car with this revolutionary Car-to-X technology detecting accidents or bad road conditions through fog or heavy rain very early. "

"This information is reported to the cloud automatically and from there to other Mercedes-Benz drivers. You will see an icon on the navigation systems and get an audio notification."

Context Awareness Will Be Key

In the first half of 2016, every tech company with a mobile messaging system has been talking up the addition of bots to their services. While most of these bots seem pretty silly today, telling you stupid jokes in your chats or ordering a pizza, this is just the beginning. In May 2016, Toyota announced plans to work with Microsoft to use that company's Azure cloud platform in part to develop predictive and contextual services.

Today that might mean a bot that you can launch with a voice command to find a table at a restaurant when you tell it you're hungry. In the mid-2030s, a future derivative of this capability could have a car waiting for you at the door when you need to head out for an appointment.

Instead launching the Uber or Lyft or Didi Chuxing app on your phone, a bot somewhere in the cloud will have access to your calendar as well as your current location. When it sees that you have an appointment in 30 minutes and it will take 20 minutes to get their in current conditions, it will talk to the Uber, Lyft or Didi bot and have the car waiting for you when you walk out the door. When you sit down, the audio system will already have logged into your media streaming service of choice, playing your favorite music, news or podcasts. The experience can be so personal, it will be as if you'd owned this vehicle for 20 years even if you've never sat in it before.

Getty ImagesNoah Berger/AFP

If you're travelling alone, it will probably be a little two-seat autonomous pod similar to Google's prototypes or GM's EN-V concepts. If the bots see that three of your friends, family or colleagues are the same location as you and going to the same destination, it will summon multiple pods that can platoon using V2V communications or a single larger vehicle. Either way, you're using only as much vehicle as needed for that trip and taking up less space on the road, leaving more space for more people to travel with less congestion.

"In a wider sense, the communication between the cars can be compared to intelligent swarm systems," adds Wagener. "Think of the information a city could offer to the passengers in a car aside from smart traffic light and parking systems, which already lower the stress level."

Depending on how you feel about the act of driving, that might be a utopia or dystopia, but either way, people that may not be able to drive today will have access to the freedom of mobility that was promised by the development of the car in the 20th century. No more standing on a rainy Manhattan corner trying to hail a cab or driving around the block for 20 minutes trying to find a parking spot. It's all enabled by adding connectivity to autonomous driving capability and electric vehicles that go off and charge their batteries or fill hydrogen tanks without you having to think about it.

For those of us that still have the means and desire to actually drive in the 2030s and beyond, we'll probably have to head out of the city and find some old country roads that few ever see anymore. The upside is we'll probably have less traffic to deal with, so we can just disconnect and enjoy the drive.

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